Why Your Great Content Isn’t Driving Great Results — And How To Fix It

When your content fires on all cylinders, the signs are obvious.

Your audience searches for your content by name, eagerly engages with it, and spends time exploring your related assets. Rave reviews are posted across social media. Buyers fill the sales funnel to connect with your sales team and buy your products.  

When your content stalls out, the signs aren’t always easy to see.

However, you must figure out how to get the content humming again. The best place to start is looking for simple oversights and missteps that cause performance to slip over time or fail to move altogether.

To help, consider these four common mistakes, along with signs, symptoms, and corrective actions to get your content program back on track.  

Mistake 1: Content lacks a clear and distinct purpose

On the surface, your content seems great — it’s creative, well-written, and provides valuable insights for consumers. You consistently produce stories in multiple formats to accommodate consumer preferences; you share them everywhere your audience will likely look for them.

However, according to your analytics, the audience doesn’t seem to care. Your content doesn’t get traction on any content platform, and those who view it move on quickly without taking action.

Signs of this mistake

“Great” content that doesn’t resonate or spark the desire to connect with your business may indicate the lack of a clear, unifying purpose. It often manifests as a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none syndrome: You aim to appeal to anyone and everyone instead of building the deeper, trusted connections that drive desirable marketing outcomes.

Here are a few signs this mistake exists:

• You publish content without defining your business purpose or how your content will work to achieve it.
• You can’t explain who your target audiences are, what you want them to do, and what it will take to nurture them from casual viewers to active customers.
• Your content doesn’t speak from a unique point of view, leaving your audience struggling to find a compelling reason to engage.

Solution: Build a content marketing strategy

It’s common to think casting the widest possible net will get your content enough traction. What business would miss an opportunity to connect with a potential customer? But even the highest-quality content in the world won’t help the business if you don’t clearly understand why it’s being created, for whom, and how it functions best as a business asset.

To make that happen, you need a content marketing strategy. Start with these three questions:

• What goals will the content help the business accomplish, and what does that contribution to success look like?
• What audiences should the storytelling activate?
• How will those stories uniquely compel and provide value to those audiences?

TIP: View your brand’s priorities through your audience’s lenses. Keep an eye on industry trends, marketplace disruptions, and emerging ideas that may affect your content’s relevance and value proposition.

Mistake 2: Content is narcissistic and lacks empathy

You’ve worked hard to create content that puts your business in the spotlight and casts your experts as follow-worthy thought leaders. But while your unique views are on an upswing, they don’t translate to an uptick in customer behaviors or inquiries.

This mistake happens when brands forget that content is a conversation — both parties must see the benefit of the exchange. Your business talks a good game but fails to give its audience members a voice, demonstrate an understanding of their problems, or express a genuine interest in providing help. Potential customers see your content as irrelevant noise and decline to engage more deeply.

Signs of this mistake

Content solely focused on your business, its offerings, and its messaging priorities shows that your business is more interested in speaking than listening — a common turnoff for today’s marketing-fatigued consumers.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to get users to consume your content. It’s to convince them to convert as customers. That becomes harder to achieve unless you demonstrate an understanding of their needs and your unique ability to satisfy them.

Here are a few signs your content is falling short:

• Your content discusses your products and solutions instead of audience needs and interests.
• Your experience is organized hierarchically rather than contextually, making it difficult for consumers to find the content they need most or take action on the intentions that brought them to it.
• Your content prioritizes attracting attention over earning the audience’s trust.

Solution: Make your audience the star of the content experience

Instead of focusing on your marketing goals first, focus on the customers’ desired outcomes — not just the transactional moves. Remember, consumers aren’t abstract constructs. They’re people who want to be seen and valued. If your content experience is built for personal resonance, it will gain traction more quickly.

These content tactics and techniques are well-suited to demonstrate a genuine interest in helping customers achieve their goals:

• Use social media to create trust, not just transactions. Pay attention to the conversations in relevant communities. Ask questions that encourage your audience members to share their experiences and then respond to their comments with genuine concern — even when you can’t provide a product-related solution.
• Drive participation with interactive content. Give audiences something to do, say, see, and feel. Allowing them to express their views, opinions, and preferences helps them feel more connected to your content experience.
• Recognize and empower customers to share their stories. Content like reviews and ratings, case studies, and testimonials lets customers talk about your benefits in their own words, which can inspire other like-minded audiences to put their trust in your brand and its value.
• Customize the information exchange. Giving your audience the ability to decide how, when, and what information they receive from your brand puts the power in their hands while keeping the channels of communication open. At the very least, offer subscribers the ability to opt out of messages they aren’t interested in. If you have marketing automation capabilities, use personalization techniques to tailor their content experience based on interests, behaviors, and preferences they’ve shared with your business.
• Enlist community members to lead your brand’s conversations. Your social media communities may be filled with subject matter experts looking to share relevant experiences and discuss challenges with their peers. Offer them opportunities to elevate their profiles, such as guest hosting your forums. Not only can this encourage their fellow participants to share authentic perspectives, but it can also increase their interest in contributing to your content success.

For example, the Content Marketing Institute asked Jeremy Bednarski, a senior manager of content strategy at Salesforce, if he would be interested in hosting the CMI Slack channel. Five years later, Jeremy’s daily conversation prompts have helped grow the channel into one of our most vibrant and active community forums.

Mistake 3: The content experience has grown stale and stagnant

It’s normal for content marketing performance to ebb and flow. However, if you see steady or significant declines, your content program could be overdue for an overhaul.

Business conditions, media trends, and consumer interests evolve, which means topics and tactics that once worked like a charm can lose their relevance and impact. And even once-reliable subscribers and followers can become less receptive to your stories if they don’t reflect current needs and priorities.

Content marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it technique. You must continually refresh your approach and offerings, so consumers see your brand experience as a resource worthy of their attention.

Signs of this mistake

Failing to adapt your content around emerging marketplace trends and consumer behaviors can harm your brand perception and drive your audience into the arms of your competitors. Avoid that fate by demonstrating your ability to experiment, innovate, and lean into new insights and ideas.

Here are some signs that a lack of content agility may put your customer relationships at risk:

• Your creative team struggles to generate fresh ideas and find novel ways to approach evergreen topics.
• Your distribution plan centers on channels your target audience has abandoned (sorry, Snapchat, SlideShare, and X) or fails to embrace up-and-coming platforms and media products.
• Your top-performing search content includes outdated stats, information, and creative examples, which reflects poorly on your brand’s relevance and value.

Solution: Audit, analyze, and intervene

Flagging performance may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to proactively see the red flags and fix obvious signs of stagnancy before they escalate into a full-scale content fail.

Audit

The process of diagnosing performance problems starts with an audit of your content assets. It can give a clearer picture of the stories and formats customers care about most and help identify critical gaps in your coverage.

TIP: The process doesn’t require a massively disruptive undertaking. A streamlined content audit speeds things up without losing any directional guidance you need.

Analyze

Monitor your analytics regularly to quickly pinpoint any high-performing assets that need updating to preserve their accuracy. The data can also reveal topics or formats to retire, allowing the team to refocus resources on areas of greater interest.

TIP: Build a performance dashboard to give the content team an at-a-glance view of the metrics that matter most for your organization’s goals.

Intervene

Once you analyze the insights and evaluate your course-correcting options, you are prepared to conquer even the most intimidating tasks required to recapture your audience’s attention and reinvigorate your content performance.

TIP: It can be challenging to get the support you need to implement strategic overhauls and tactical retrofits. CMI’s Robert Rose recommends staying the course in the short term while working behind the scenes to build a new strategy from the ground up.

Mistake 4: Team resources are pushed to breaking point

“Do more with less” — it’s the default mantra for every budget-conscious marketing department (and show me one that isn’t). Out of necessity and determination, your team pulls together, tightens their belts, and pushes forward as best they can with the resources available.

But there comes a point when frugality exceeds feasibility. When marketers stretch content resources beyond those limits, the resulting stress can send shock waves across productivity, work quality, and turnover.

Signs of this mistake

A company might need to add a few tasks to their content creators’ to-do lists in a pinch. However, these stop-gap measures shouldn’t be a long-term substitute for filling critical roles or providing adequate resources.

When extra tasks and asks add up to an untenable volume, signs like these may appear:

• The normally high-functioning content team loses efficiency. They struggle with getting regularly planned efforts off the ground, let alone bringing novel content ideas and initiatives to fruition.
• Deadlines are frequently missed, obvious errors are made, and exciting projects sit in limbo because the team focuses on the low-hanging fruit that can be executed quickly.
• Team morale is shot, staff churn is high, and burned-out workers air grievances on public channels.

Solution: Educate, prioritize, and partner on content

Businesses commonly expect their content marketing teams to tackle all kinds of content requests across the enterprise. This scope creep typically happens when hiring budgets are stretched, and no one else can share the writing workload. It also occurs when management sees competitors making waves on a new channel and demands that a brand also needs a presence.

You can address these issues in a few ways, but it always starts with a root cause.

Educate

When management doesn’t understand why your content team can’t just create a few more assets to fuel a new channel or fulfill their requests, developing (and documenting) a clear content plan is a good idea.

Sharing this business case for content creation and distribution, quality criteria, governance policies, and benefits can help stakeholders see the bigger strategic picture. Once they recognize how much work is involved in effective content marketing, they may provide additional support or authorize a budget increase.

Prioritize

With too few players and too many asks, your team must set clear priorities around the content types, channels, and platforms.

Implementing a content-scoring process can help with this. It provides a quantifiable way to gauge which kinds of content deliver the strongest performance against industry benchmarks or internal criteria. That information can help you advocate for focusing your resources on viable efforts and pulling back on less impactful ones.

For example, if your company wants to add livestreaming video to the mix, run some competitors’ efforts through your scoring worksheet first. If you find that those conditions aren’t ideal for your business (e.g., you don’t have video editors or production resources, your audience isn’t engaging with this format, the market is oversaturated with competing livestreams), it’s best to leave it off your list until the situation changes.

However, if you discover that this new format presents an attractive opportunity or offers a high-priority benefit you have been struggling to provide, scale down or pause lower-performing content activities to free up the necessary team resources.

Partner with creators and technology

If your options are limited and upper management won’t staff up or scale down, forge a content partnership.

Co-creating content with the help of relevant industry influencers, high-profile thought leaders, and like-minded complementary brands can be a cost-effective way to shore up your assets without overstressing in-house content creators. Tap into your actively engaged community’s creative talents by empowering them to contribute guest posts or other types of user-generated content.

Content partnerships don’t always have to be people-centric. You can unlock content marketing potential by pairing your human creatives with the power of technology.  

Incorporate generative AI and other machine-learning tools into your content operations to produce more content — in more formats — with less manual effort:

• Remix and reuse existing content to give older assets new relevance and value.
• Fill gaps in your team’s design or video production capabilities using AI to transform text-based content into eye-catching videos, animations, and data visualizations.
• Use text-to-audio tools to instantly convert lengthy copy into easy-to-consume audio stories and podcasts.  

TIP: Consider these nine additional actions to help get better content results without blowing your budget or causing your team to break down.  

Got problems? Get answers

Though not all content marketing problems have simple solutions, identifying warning signs like these four is your best first line of defense against major missteps, miscalculations, and missed opportunities. What other big content challenges are you currently struggling with? Share this article on social with a comment.

Updated from a September 2021 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute